Dressing up your character in World of Warcraft or The Sims is one thing, but what about dressing up your avatar for work? Analyst firm Gartner warns that, by 2013, avatars will have to have dress codes too.

“As the use of virtual environments for business purposes grows, enterprises need to understand how employees are using avatars in ways that might affect the enterprise or the enterprise’s reputation,” said James Lundy, managing vice president at Gartner, in a statement.

Image from the World Economic Forum

Seriously? Companies are really going to start having business meetings in the corporate version of Second Life?

Yeah, I don’t see that happening. I mean, there are already classes being taught in SL, but to me that’s more a fad than anything else. Conference calls, WebEx meetings, and long chains of e-mails will continue to be the norm for quite some time.

Think about it: you meet in Second Life, but all your stuff is in Word, or Excel, or Powerpoint — so you have to flip back and forth, right? Either that or you’ll just end up using the SL interface to view the files being shared by everyone.

Actually, y’know what the future of collaborative meetings online will be?

Although I do think that, as more companies adopt instant messaging and company-sponsored tiwttering, people are going to have to stop using amusing pictures of puppies as their IM or Twitter avatars and start using their company ID headshots.